On March 1, 2020, two full weeks before the country shut down, “two weeks to stop the spread,” I urged vitamins and exercise rather than pandemic pandemonium as the best protection against covid.
It turns out I was on target.
Men and women who worked out at least 30 minutes most days were about four times more likely to survive covid-19 than inactive people, according to an eye-opening study of exercise and coronavirus outcomes among almost 200,000 adults in Southern California.The study found that exercise, in almost any amount, reduced people’s risks for a severe coronavirus infection. Even people who worked out for as little as 11 minutes a week — yes, a week — experienced lower risks of hospitalization or death from covid than those who moved about less.“It turns out exercise is even more powerful than we thought” at protecting people from severe covid, said Robert Sallis, a clinical professor at Kaiser Permanente Bernard J. Tyson School of Medicine in Los Angeles and senior author of the new study.The findings add to mounting evidence that any amount of exercise helps lower the ferocity of coronavirus infections, a message with particular relevance now, as holiday travel and gatherings ramp up and covid cases continue to rise.
This finding is especially irksome in light of the closed gyms during the lockdowns. Many owners were forced to close or are still struggling with consequences that never needed to occur.
As the covid narrative is being rewritten to better align with realities, I will point out that many of us are old enough to remember when suggesting exercise to prevent severe covid illness was “fat-phobic.”
Many were worried about contact tracing due to the power of the surveillance tools that would be developed and utilized to conduct other monitoring. It turns out they were right as well.
Now, from Beijing to Jerusalem to Hyderabad, India, and Perth, Australia, The Associated Press has found that authorities used these technologies and data to halt travel for activists and ordinary people, harass marginalized communities and link people’s health information to other surveillance and law enforcement tools. In some cases, data was shared with spy agencies…For more than a year, AP journalists interviewed sources and pored over thousands of documents to trace how technologies marketed to “flatten the curve” were put to other uses. Just as the balance between privacy and national security shifted after the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, COVID-19 has given officials justification to embed tracking tools in society that have lasted long after lockdowns.“Any intervention that increases state power to monitor individuals has a long tail and is a ratcheting system,” said John Scott-Railton, a senior researcher at the Toronto-based internet watchdog Citizen Lab. “Once you get it, is very unlikely it will ever go away.”
Perhaps it is time for bureaucrats, politicians, and journalists to utilize different sources of information in the future covid analysis.
For example, I have noted that respiratory protection for long-term use in non-occupational settings was full of fail. There are other studies that also underscore mask mandates will not stop the spread of covid.
Yet, “experts” are once again pressing for mask-wearing.
The C.D.C. officially advises wearing a mask on a county-by-county basis depending on community Covid-19 levels, which take into account virus-related hospital admissions, bed capacity and case rates. However, in an interview with NPR last week, Dr. Rochelle Walensky, the C.D.C. director, said, “You don’t need to wait for C.D.C.’s recommendation, certainly, to wear a mask.”
There were so many lessons our political leaders, public health officials, and media could have learned in the nearly three years the covid virus has spread across the globe. Too bad humility and restraint were not among them.
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